Speaker information

Sir John Gieve, Former Bank of England and Visiting Professor at UCL
Lord Roger Liddle, Chair of the Board Policy Network and Labour member of the UK House of Lords
David Babbs, Executive Director, 38 Degrees
Dr Colin Provos, Department of Political Science, UCL
John Peet, The Economist

There are longstanding concerns regarding the democratic standards of the EU and its capacity to engage with citizens. This oft-invoked ‘democratic deficit’ specifically concerns the incomplete development of instruments of parliamentary democracy at the EU level, such as: the accountability of decision-making bodies to the electorate; party-political competition with rival programmes and ideologies; the capacity of public opinion-formation to influence policy development; and the balance between executive power and parliamentary oversight.

Increasingly, Europeanization and wider globalising trends, has led to policies that were previously the exclusive competence of national governments (such as fiscal and social policies, or the implications of non-discrimination on grounds of nationality), to be constrained by non-majoritarian institutions that are only partially and often vary indirectly under domestic political control.